The Undivided (39 page)

‘You speak nonsense, Marcroy Tarth.’

Marcroy was losing patience with Ciarán. His tiresome insistence on interjecting every time Marcroy drew breath was starting to irk the
sídhe
lord.

‘It’s only nonsense because you don’t like what I’m telling you,’ Marcroy said, standing over the prone warrior, still bound to the floor by magic.

‘Every word you utter is a lie!’ Brógán said, no doubt in an attempt to appear defiant. The young Druid healer had been much more forthcoming when Ciarán was unconscious.

Marcroy was tempted to send Ciarán back into unconsciousness now, except it might be useful to have him hear what Marcroy was about to reveal. It might even make an ally of him.

After all, Marcroy had once managed to turn the Vate of All Eire into a spy. Ciarán mac Connacht was hardly even a challenge after that feat.

‘Despite the self-serving deathbed confession Amergin made, it was Amergin himself who chose where to send Rónán,’ Marcroy said, ignoring Brógán’s protests. It wasn’t strictly the truth, of course, but it was close enough to fit with what these Druids knew to be true. ‘And to where does one abandon a child one is sworn to protect, without breaking one’s oath?’

The two Druids didn’t answer immediately. Marcroy wasn’t sure if it was because they could not work out what he was telling them, or whether they were too appalled by it.

Eventually, Brógán spoke up. He shook his head in wonder. ‘Amergin sent the child to the other realm’s version of himself.’

‘Don’t listen to him, Brógán,’ Ciarán insisted. ‘What he says is not possible. There is no magic in the world where they sent Rónán. You know that. You’ve been there.’

‘Of course there is no magic,’ Marcroy agreed. ‘But the Druid line Amergin was descended from remains true. Amergin sent Rónán to the man he would have been, had the treaty of
Tír Na nÓg
never been forged. His
eileféin
in the other realm.’

‘Patrick Boyle,’ Brógán said.

Marcroy turned to Brógán. ‘Is that his name? Patrick Boyle?’

‘It’s the name of the man who rescued Rónán from the loch.’ Brógán was starting to accept the possibility even in the face of Ciarán’s objections. Marcroy supposed it was inevitable that Brógán be the one to see the connection first. After all, he’d spent months in the other realm tracking Rónán down, and every waking moment with the boy in this realm since their return.

‘You actually met Rónán’s father in the other realm?’

Brógán shook his head. ‘No. And he wasn’t Rónán’s father, as such. But he was certainly around while he was growing up. I believe he married the housekeeper employed by Rónán’s adopted mother.’

Marcroy nodded. It made perfect sense. ‘Keeping an eye on the child he was sworn to protect with no understanding of why he felt compelled to do so,’ he said. ‘So you see the danger. If Rónán tries to bring this Boyle character back to this realm —’

‘Amergin is dead,’ Ciarán pointed out from the floor. ‘It makes no difference now.’

‘But that would make Hayley Boyle the alternate reality version of Trása,’ Brógán added thoughtfully, following his own train of thought.

That news caught Marcroy completely off guard. ‘He has a
daughter
?’

‘It’s why they’ve gone back,’ Brógán said absently. ‘She was injured and Rónán wanted to help her. But she can only be healed magically by bringing her back here and —’ Brógán abruptly shut his mouth.

Marcroy was flabbergasted.

‘
That’s
why the Undivided have gone rift running? To bring back Trása Ni’Amergin’s
eileféin
?’

‘Do not say another word, you fool,’ Ciarán ordered, with a remarkable amount of authority despite being bound and helpless on the floor. ‘You’ve said too much already.’

Marcroy was too entranced by the idea of Trása’s
eileféin
to bother chastising the warrior. What was she like, this human version of his niece? Did they look alike? Was her mother of
sídhe
stock like Elimyer, or was she the result of some random coupling that rendered any latent power she might possess completely useless?

And what would happen when they brought her back here?

In a heartbeat, Marcroy’s plans had again changed. This unexpected bonus, brought on by the foolishness of two boys with an overdeveloped sense of chivalry, was a gift from
Danú
herself.

Everything he’d done he could now explain to the Brethren. The Undivided would break the treaty themselves, and the
sídhe
would be free of its obligations. He couldn’t hide his smile. ‘By the goddess, do they not realise what they’ve risked by doing this?’

From the look on Brógán’s face, it was clear he was starting to work it out. It was bad enough both boys had left this realm at the same time — worse that they were the Undivided and
specifically forbidden to leave. Although the effects would not be immediately felt, if they stayed away too long their loss would eventually begin to tell on every Druid who needed the Undivided to draw down the
sídhe
magic. But it was even worse than that. Rift running was dangerous at the best of times, which is why the jewels that made it possible to open a dimensional rift — as opposed to opening a veil to travel between locations in the same realm — were so carefully controlled.

To knowingly bring back someone’s
eileféin …

That wasn’t just foolish, it was criminal; a breach of
Tuatha
law that defied belief. That in itself was enough to breach the Treaty of
Tír Na nÓg.

Marcroy turned on Ciarán. ‘You permitted this?’ he asked. ‘Worse, you actively encouraged it by opening the rift for them?’

‘No law has been broken,’ Ciarán said. Interesting that he had stopped accusing Marcroy of lying.

‘Not yet,’ Marcroy said. ‘But the moment those boys step through the rift with both Trása and this girl … what did you say her name was?’

‘Hayley Boyle.’

‘Hayley Boyle,’ Marcroy repeated, savouring the taste of his victory. ‘The moment she sets foot in this realm, the treaty is broken.’

‘There is nothing in the treaty about the Undivided going rift running,’ Ciarán reminded him.

‘I’ll grant you that, but the clause regarding human respect for
Tuatha
law is very specific,’ he said. ‘You know this, Ciarán, better than most. You’ve been gifted with the power to open rifts into other realms. Do you not remember the responsibilities that go with that power? The oath you swore when it was given to you?’

Ciarán couldn’t meet his eye, which was encouraging. ‘I remember.’

‘And yet here you stand … or rather … lie,’ Marcroy said, ‘complicit in the very act that will destroy the Treaty of
Tír Na nÓg
and the Druids along with it.’

Brógán stared at Ciarán in alarm. ‘Is that true? Have we broken the treaty?’

‘Of course not,’ Ciarán said, but he sounded less certain than he had a moment ago. ‘There is no
Tuatha
law that prevents both the Undivided leaving this realm. It’s a Druid law, and unlike the laws of the
Daoine sídhe
, we can break those as often as we please without fatally incurring the wrath of our queen. As for this girl … there’s no guarantee they’ll even find her. Or that they’ll bring her back. And even if they do, you heard the
Leipreachán
. Trása flew through the rift into the other realm in bird form. Assuming she even survived the crossing, she would have to come back to this realm with Rónán and Darragh
and
the other girl for the
eileféin
law to be breached.’ Ciarán looked up at Marcroy, his eyes furious. ‘It’ll take more than you twisting the facts to bring down the Druids, Tarth.’

‘Bring down the Druids?’ Marcroy gasped, his hand on his heart, offended by the very suggestion. ‘Bring down the Druids? Can you not see, my old friend? I’m doing my utmost here to preserve them, something you’re sworn to do too, are you not? I’m trying to save these foolish boys from themselves, not destroy them. Or your silly little order of Druids.’ He turned to Brógán. ‘
You
understand I’m trying to help, don’t you?’

‘If you’re trying to help, why did you capture us the way you did? Why torture Ciarán? Why not just come to us and explain?’

Ah
, Marcroy thought.
He has a point there.

‘Because there is no other way to make you listen,’ he said, hoping the young man was too befuddled to notice the flaw in his logic. ‘You know what Ciarán is like. I had no choice but to restrain him. He’d run me through if I ever got close enough and you weren’t going to talk to me because he’d poisoned your
opinion of me before we’d even met. How else was I meant to warn you of the danger in which these foolish boys have placed your entire order in?’

Brógán shook his head. Ciarán wasn’t helping much, either. Perhaps it was time to kill him.

For a moment, Marcroy pondered the ramifications of killing a Druid lord as powerful and well connected as Ciarán mac Connacht. The Treaty of
Tír Na nÓg
wasn’t clear on that point. Although killing using magic was strictly forbidden, it wasn’t exactly forbidden to kill a Druid using mundane means — or for a Druid to kill one of the
Tuatha
for that matter. Those who had drafted the original treaty had been wise enough not to fill it with conditions that could not easily be kept, so the past deaths had never actually caused a treaty breach.

Orlagh — when she bothered to take notice of what was happening outside the
sídhe
kingdom — claimed it was because practical women and not men had written the agreement. Orlagh and Boadicea had hammered out the terms in plenty of time to defeat the Romans, while Claudius was gathering his forces in Gaul. By the time he arrived in Albion, ready to take the islands, Boadicea had an army of gifted Druids at her back. A good thing, too, Marcroy thought. In other realms, where Boadicea ignored or refused an alliance with the
Tuatha
— so Marcroy had heard from half-human rift runners who had visited other worlds — things had gone rather badly for her and rather much better for the Romans.

Before Marcroy could make up his mind whether Ciarán mac Connacht would live or die, Brógán suddenly sat straighter in his chair, and his eyes rolled back in his head.

Recognising what it meant, Marcroy hurried over to the young Druid and squatted down to listen.

‘They’re trying to contact you from the other realm, aren’t they?’

Brógán shook his head, but there was no denying it.

‘Warn them!’ Ciarán called out from the floor. ‘Warn RónánDarragh they’ll be coming home to a trap!’

Marcroy waved his hand in Ciarán’s direction, extending his bonds to cover his mouth, and turned his attention to Brógán.

‘Ignore Ciarán,’ he said, as Brógán fought the magical link. He needed water to make it complete, but that was easily fixed. It was raining outside. Marcroy just needed to be sure Brógán told whoever was trying to contact him only what Marcroy wanted them to know.

‘It’s a trap!’ was high on the list of things he’d prefer Brógán keep to himself.

‘Your duty is to make sure RónánDarragh are returned to this realm in safety,’ Marcroy said carefully.

Brógán nodded, straining against his bonds.

‘If you alarm them,’ said Marcroy, ‘that won’t happen, you understand that, don’t you?’

The young Druid nodded again, his eyes desperate.

‘Then I’m going to let you go outside and find some clear water, and you’re going to speak to whoever is seeking to contact you from the other realm. You will assure them everything is fine here, then find out when and where they want Ciarán to open the rift, and nothing more.’

Brógán glanced at Ciarán, but the warrior couldn’t move at all.

Marcroy moved, blocking Brógán’s view of the Druid lord. ‘If you don’t, my brave young friend, I will kill Lord mac Connacht, and then you. Then the Undivided will never come home.’

Ciarán would know that preventing a rift runner from coming home violated the treaty so comprehensively that Marcroy could never carry out such a threat, but Brógán still had much to learn.

Brógán nodded, and Marcroy released his magical bonds. He offered Brógán a hand to steady him, satisfied that the Undivided would have no inkling of what waited for them on their return from the other world.

‘You’re not going in there alone,’ Sorcha announced.

Ren turned to stare at her in the back seat. Her expression was set.

‘And what do you think you’re going to do to help?’ Ren asked. ‘Scream with terror when we get in a lift? Pull a knife on the first orderly who asks you why you’re there?’

‘He has a point, Sorcha,’ Darragh said, a little more sympathetically than Ren. ‘This is not your realm. Or mine. Trása is a better choice to accompany Rónán.’

They were sitting outside the St Christopher’s Visual Rehabilitation Centre as far from the main entrance as they could get and still be able to see it. Although it wasn’t quite seven in the evening, it was dark, the street lit by glistening puddles of light. A misty rain was falling, obscuring their clear view of the six-storey building — a square, ugly, concrete-and-glass monstrosity squatting on a street of more elegant older buildings.

Ren had parked the car in the shadows while they decided their next move. If there were cameras at the entrance, Ren didn’t want them to capture more than a fleeting glimpse of any of them. Once Hayley vanished from her room, he figured there’d be some hard questions asked at St Christopher’s about how the centre lost one of their patients.

There was also the question about whether or not Hayley would even agree to come with him. Ren had no idea what she’d been told about his disappearance. For all he knew, she thought he was dead and would scream the house down when he appeared. He didn’t think that likely — Hayley was a level-headed sort of girl — but it wasn’t impossible. Then there was the problem of how he would explain what was going on. How was he going to convince her he had come to help? Or even that he could help her? ‘
Hi, Hayley, did you want to come with me to an alternate reality so we can heal your blindness with magic
?’ It didn’t seem like a very promising opening.

And even if she believed him, would she consider leaving this world for another, with the possibility she might never come back?

Ren had the advantage there. He’d grown up knowing he was adopted — that somewhere out there he might have another family. As a small child, he’d fantasised his real family would find him one day. When they were finally reunited, his long-lost mother would hug him and kiss him and tell him the fabulous story of how he’d been kidnapped by evil faeries and spirited away, and how she hadn’t slept since that moment.

Ren smiled briefly. He may not get his moment with his long dead mother, but he really had — as it turned out — been kidnapped by evil Faeries.

Still, he wished Hayley had some other sort of injury. One that didn’t obstruct her vision. Then he could have just appeared in her room with Darragh at his side, told her about the whole psychic twin business with his brother there to prove it, and everything would be so much more believable.

He didn’t share his fears about Hayley’s reaction with the others. They were already worried about their conversation a short while ago, with Brógán.

The puddle-phone had worked, eventually. It had taken forever to get through to Brógán, and by the time Brógán’s face
appeared in the water bowl, Ren was freezing. Not only was the rainwater icy, but they were sitting in the rain without a stitch of clothing on, their hands soaking in the chilly bowl, concealed in a small thicket in a suburban park as the sun went down, while Sorcha and Trása kept watch.

It had taken the combined magic of both tattoos to reach the other realm. And when they did make contact, it wasn’t what they were expecting. Ren wanted to know why they were even bothering with Brógán. Not that he didn’t like the young Druid, but it seemed far more efficient to contact Ciarán directly, seeing as he was the one who had to open the rift.

Both Darragh and Sorcha had scoffed at the idea. Brógán was, in the general scheme of things, fairly unimportant. He was not likely to be noticed if his eyes suddenly rolled back in his head, a sure sign that someone was trying to contact you by puddle-phone, apparently. Ciarán would have had many more questions to answer if he was caught in such a compromising act. It was better not to make things more awkward for him than they already were, by advertising that he had opened an unauthorised doorway to an alternate reality so the Undivided could go rift running.

Brógán seemed nervous and evasive when Darragh spoke to him, particularly on the subject of where Ciarán was. But the call had been necessarily brief. It had ended with Brógán promising to have Ciarán open the rift at moonrise.

That might have been useful information if Ren had some idea of when moonrise was going to happen.

Still, at least they had a timetable now. Ren put aside the bizarre notion that they’d called up someone from another reality using a bowl of water and a tattoo, and instead worked on the more immediate problem of finding Hayley. He figured they had a couple of hours to get into St Christopher’s, locate Hayley, convince her to come with them, get her out of the
building, drive back to the Castle Golf Course, find the stone circle again and jump through the rift.

After that … well, he’d deal with that when they got there.

‘Let’s go, then,’ Trása said, her hand on the door latch. ‘Time’s awasting.’

‘Wait!’

‘For what!’

Rónán pointed to the entrance of St Christopher’s. A Gardaí car had pulled up in the ‘no parking’ zone at the entrance. Two officers climbed out of the vehicle and entered the building.

‘Shit,’ Ren muttered.

Darragh looked at him curiously. ‘Is there a problem?’

‘The cops are here.’

‘That may not have anything to do with us,’ Trása said, leaning forward to stare over Ren’s shoulder through the rain-spattered windscreen. ‘I mean, they didn’t arrive in a blaze of light and sirens. If the Gardaí realised you were here, Rónán, wouldn’t all the police in Dublin be converging on us?’

Trása had a point. Chelan Aquarius Kavanaugh was an escaped fugitive on the run from a murder charge. If they thought he was here, they’d be descending on the place like a swarm of locusts. And probably armed. The Gardaí didn’t carry guns as a rule, but if they thought they were in pursuit of an escaped murderer, someone was sure to have brought out the sidearms and started handing them around.

‘How would they even know we are here?’ Sorcha asked.

‘Warren might have blabbed,’ Ren said, not entirely happy with the way they’d dealt with their hapless captive.

‘I thought you said Jack was going to take care of Warren.’

‘Yeah, but even if he doesn’t tell anybody about us, an anonymous tip-off might be his way of getting revenge. I mean, he heard us talking enough.’

‘Not about this place,’ Darragh said.

‘No, but he heard us mention Hayley. Maybe he phoned in a tip, and the cops are just checking if everything’s okay with her.’

‘Then it’s a good thing we waited,’ Sorcha said. ‘When they return to their vehicle, it will be safe to proceed, yes?’

Ren shrugged. ‘I suppose.’

It took a nerve-wracking half-hour before the Gardaí returned and climbed back in their car. As it pulled away from the kerb, Ren turned to Darragh.

‘Did you pick up enough during the
Comhroinn
to learn how to drive?’

Darragh looked around the car a little dubiously. ‘I certainly know the
principles
involved, but I’m not sure if that’s the same as knowing how to control this thing.’

Ren shrugged. It would have to do. ‘If we’re not back in thirty minutes, make your way back to the golf course, wait for Ciarán to open the rift and then go home.’

‘I won’t leave you here,’ Darragh objected.

‘Sure you will,’ Ren told him, glancing at the clock on the dashboard. They were running out of time and really didn’t need to have this discussion. At least, not here. Not now. ‘You can come back and get me when it’s safe. It’s not like you won’t have done it before.’

‘No.’

‘Dude, we really don’t have time to argue about this. If I’m caught here — in this place, in this reality — I am royally screwed. There is no reason on this earth — or any earth for that matter — for you to go down with me.’

‘Your brother displays wisdom worthy of the Undivided,’ Sorcha told Darragh approvingly.

‘Wisdom?’ Trása asked with a short, sceptical laugh.

‘Nobody asked for your opinion,
sídhe
.’

‘Good thing, too,’ Trása said, leaning back in her seat with a scowl. ‘Because if they had, I might have been compelled to
point out that the Undivided both jumping into a magic-depleted realm where one of them is wanted for murder so they can kidnap some girl who might not even want their help, hardly qualifies as
wisdom
.’

‘And what was your reason for jumping through the rift after us into this magic-depleted realm where one of them is wanted for murder because of something
you
did?’ Sorcha asked. When Trása just looked away and didn’t answer, Sorcha turned to Ren. ‘Don’t worry,
Leath tiarna
,’ she assured him. ‘I’ll make certain Darragh gets home safely.’

‘But how will we even find the golf course and the stone circle without you?’ Darragh asked.

‘I remember the way,’ the warrior assured him. ‘I have an excellent sense of direction, even in this realm.’ She turned to his brother. ‘Go, Rónán. We’re losing time.’

He nodded. ‘Come on, Trása. Let’s go.’

Trása showed no inclination to move. ‘Oh, so my
opinion
isn’t wanted,’ she said sulkily, ‘but you need me to hold your hand on your little adventure?’

‘I need you to keep watch while I explain things to Hayley.’

‘Give me one good reason why I should help?’

‘Because if you don’t,’ Darragh informed her flatly, ‘when we get back to our realm, rather than release you from Marcroy’s curse, I’ll add another one to it and you’ll never be free.’

Ren wasn’t sure if Darragh could do that, but Trása seemed to believe it. ‘Fine,’ she snapped, opening the door. ‘Let’s go find your friend and get out of here. I’m sick of this realm. I want to go home.’